Fire

Image from ID2Studio

I like women who hate,
women who insult,
get mad and shout

Those women who know they are fire
and know how to burn passionately

Men fear those women, mistrust them,
hey call them exaggerated and fanatics
because they fear the fire they can’t control

They say to women why burn like that?
Look, I can show you
you can be like an oven
look how useful you can be in that corner
not harming anyone, they say
their hand firmly on the knob
knowing they’re in control
to turn on or off, and regulate

They say fire has been controlled already
there’es no need to set ourselves on fire
why dance around a bonfire
there’s nothing to learn
nothing to discover

Depp inside they know
the fire they fear
will burn away this plastic model
they manufactured to feel gods

Our fire
Like the gaze of God in Eden
reminds them of their own

 

2. My road to the Encuentro

I found out about the existence of the Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting) a few years ago, but only in this occasion I had the means to travel and attend it.

During that time, my curiosity for feminism evolved into a more solid knowledge, then comprehension and finally, thanks to the Encuentro itself, in political activism.

Image from Kelly Barnhill

Just like my awakening to political consciousness and citizenship, I made an effort to explore and understand the different points of view and strategies within the women’s movement.

I found myself within a world of ideas, considerably more complex, diverse and contradictory than an ideology or a political-party-oriented identity.

1. ¿What is the Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres?

The following excerpts were selected and translated from Spanish by me.

There are links to the original content at the end of each section.

Organization

Year after year, women from all corners of Argentina get together to try and make our thousands of voices heard, through an open, democratic and participatory system.

Logo image from the 28° Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres

These meetings are the most important expression of the fights and struggles we face in our different places, neighborhoods, cities, homes, works, etc.

In them, we all learn together, we say it is one big school. We share our experiences among women from very different places in our country. Thousands of us discovered through the Encuentros that the daily oppression we endure is not our destiny.

We do this through a practice that contradicts the social practices imposed upon women, and it is in the workshops of the Encuentro where we recover the voices of those of us who have no voice.

Thus we strengthen this democratic, horizontal and heterogeneous space, which has no owner because it belongs to all of us.

My experience at the 29th National Women’s Meeting in Argentina

This year, I participated for the first time in an event called Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting) during its 29th edition, in the city of Salta.

The National Women’s Meeting takes place annually in Argentina since 1986. It is an ​​autonomous, self-organized, democratic, pluralistic, self-funded, federal and horizontal meeting.

It is held in a different city every year, the new location is chosen democratically in the final assembly of each meeting.

With the intent to enrich the debate around the organization of women with focus in Argentina, I’m sharing my experience of participating for the first time in the Encuentro and, from my subjective point of view, my personal and political reflections.

The art of spitting and walking

In the art of personifying the “opposite gender”, one can find a million subtle ways in which we are trained to perform a gender role.

In this post, I will focus on two of them, spitting and walking, because they illustrate two dimensions of gender differences:

• Walking is an activity which men and women have in common, but execute in different ways, although that difference is usually invisible in our daily lives.
• Spitting, instead, is an activity assigned to the masculine gender exclusively. Spitting isn’t “ladylike”.

We will therefore analyze these two actions from the perspective of gender social roles and my own experience as a Drag King.

The way we are, the way we walk

One of the most consistent examples of behavior which is learned, but generally deemed as “natural”, is the way we walk.

It’s something we do every day, hardly noticing we do it in a special way.

Today is not just Women’s Day

Today is not just Women’s Day,
It’s not a day for flowers or presents
or to go “what about teh menz?”

No. I’ll tell you what day is today.

Today is the day to think about ourselves,
and how we treat women every day,
how we talk to them, how we talk about them,
what space we give them in our personal world.

Image from The Prisma

Today is the day to think, above all,
of those women we like the least,
who choose what we wouldn’t choose for them,
who were born to a disgraceful life,
and the respect we owe to them all.

Today is bad women’s day.
Today is whores and lesbian women’s day,
fat and ugly and poor women’s day,
old women and jailed women’s day.

Today is screaming women’s day,
crying women’s day
and silenced women’s day.

Today is battered women’s day,
the day of kidnapped and tortured women
of women raped by their own husbands.